Twenty-nine-year-old Samantha, whose last name has been withheld, shared the story of her transformation from a fairly typical 20-something, into a book-burning white nationalist, describing to CNN this week the details of her journey into – and later out of – the alt-right.
In the fall of 2016, Samantha was a ‘vaguely liberal non-voter’, dating an ‘indie-rock-loving’ boyfriend who, on the surface, showed no signs of his fringe beliefs.
That fall, however, Samantha noticed her boyfriend’s behavior began to change, including unsettling references to a perverse, violent white supremacist fantasy dubbed the “Day of the Rope”, in which Jews, blacks, “race traitors” and other ‘undesirables’ are killed en masse.
“I couldn’t believe it,” said Samantha. “We both knew so many people that fit that description.”
While her boyfriend reassured her that the comments were ‘just jokes’, he added that he was a believer in fascism, and that he could not date anyone who didn’t embrace similar ideas.
After researching the alt-right on the internet, Samantha was eventually drawn to the pseudo-intellectual arguments of white nationalist writers like Richard B. Spencer and Jared Taylor.
Within week, Samantha formally joined Identity Evropa, the white nationalist group which created the “You Will Not Replace Us” slogan that was later chanted by white supremacists at the infamous ‘Unite the Right’ rally in Charlottesville, Virginia in 2017.
Talking with white nationalists in the organization’s chatrooms, Samantha says she was slowly desensitized to the kind of shocking rhetoric commonly used within the alt-right.
“Like it starts as a joke where you laugh nervously. Then you kind of stop laughing, ‘cause you’re used to it. And then you start to post it yourself, because you want to be a part of that.”
By May of 2017, Samantha was taking part in group meetings and rural getaways, including a book-burning in upstate New York.
“It’s all so surreal,” Samantha recalled. “You’re literally standing there, going ‘I’m at a book burning at someone’s house. Like, there are families that live next door. There’s probably a nice person who lives across the street, and I’m burning books about Jewish people.’”
Samantha gradually became disenchanted with the white nationalist movement, however, beginning with what describes as the misogynistic environment within Identity Evropa.
Later, however, Samantha also found herself unable to reconcile her own instincts with the beliefs of the alt-right.
When she heard a white supremacist woman berating a white man for not saying he would give preference to white people in a life-or-death situation, Samantha began to feel uneasy.
The woman had asked the man what he would do, hypothetically, if there was a fire in a house with 10 people inside – five of them black, and five of them white.
When he answered that he would save whoever he could reach, Samantha thought to herself “That’s what I would do, too.”
The final breaking point came when Samantha’s grandmother died, after she felt ashamed that her grandmother could not be proud of her.
Samantha later joined the group Life After Hate, which assists people who have left or are trying to leave fringe organizations.